ALL FALL DOWN! THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORKPLACE -- IS ITS REINVENTION TO BE BY THE SEAT OF THE PANTS?

                             ALL FALL DOWN!  THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORKPLACE

IS ITS REINVENTION TO BE BY THE SEAT OF THE PANTS?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 31, 2014

Nikil Saval has bravely written a book about the workplace dilemma, putting it in the perspective of what work has become over the last two centuries. 

He calls his work, “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” (2014), making reference to the cubicles or open cages that have become endemic to the modern workplace.

Saval reminds us of an open secret, and that is that three quarters to four fifths of workers today make nothing, touch nothing that is made, but only track what is made financially and logistically.

Most workers cannot imagine a workplace other than the open boxes they occupy in tall buildings.

Moreover, people, who work on farms or in our disappearing factories, don’t have a clue as to what office workers do, or why they are doing it.  In any case, they don't consider what they do as being "work," as they know the word to mean.

Alas, most office workers would find it difficult to describe their jobs as work as it is not "hands on." These workers don't mine, manufacturer, construct buildings, build roads, or canvass or teach, but they still feel superior to people who do.  It is one way to justify better pay, working conditions, and cleaner clothes.

In the late nineteenth century, as office workers became an increasing presence, what they actually did was not totally clear to anyone, leastwise themselves.  They showed up every work day and followed orders.

They acquired “positions” and felt justified in looking down at people who made things, did things, and knew exactly their worth.

Corporate guru Peter Drucker was to tag these workers as “knowledge workers,” a concept that took hold although relatively meaningless.  He assigned this term to people involved in planning, directing, designing, negotiating, organizing, recording, tracking, etc.

Drucker is a philosopher for corporate executives who read no philosophy.

It was nice to see Saval give a nod to the medieval guilds that combined work and management as a single function and not a division of labor between the two. 

A form of the guild was adopted in the 20th century with great success, called Skunk Works™.  The aerospace industry has promoted Skunk Works or small work groups giving them specific assignments, often out performing groups ten times their size.

Nineteenth century Europe created office workers, housing them in large buildings that managed to diminish them as persons by the sheer size of these structures, which played on their psychology. 

In the 20th century, these buildings became skyscrapers.  Hundreds, even thousands of workers rushed into these buildings to take residence in diminutive ready-made spaces.  The buildings defined the work that these office workers did.

A kind of intimate dependency developed between office workers and their bosses, who kept close tabs on their work. 

The closeness of office workers and bosses precluded any possibility of unionization as these workers were less inclined to sue for pay or working conditions, but rather to cue for greater intimacy with their bosses. 

Prestige could be earned by how many times an office workers was invited into the boss's closed office, often a glass bubble, to discuss a project.  Brownie points were powerful incentives.

To give a sense of how well defined this was between the boss and the worker, when I was interviewing for assignment in Europe in the late 1980s for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, I was waiting to be interviewed by the late Dr. Helmet Hosse, President of Honeywell's extensive German operation, when I had to go to the bathroom. 

From the corner of my eye, I spied a washroom off the President’s office, and moved towards it.  The President’s secretary nearly made a flying tackle of me as I approached the washroom, yelling in German, “Can’t you see that is Dr. Hosse's private washroom?”

Charles Dickens in David Copperfield created Uriah Heep (1850) with his cloying humility and obsequious manner, as one form of an office worker.  Herman Melville in contrast created Bartleby (1853), who’s enigmatic refusal to work became the haunting mantra, “I prefer not to.”

By 1855, a third of all workers in New York City were office workers.

The pre-20th century office worker felt superior to the laboring masses, but ambivalent about his management. This worker was solipsistic but nothing compared to the narcissism of the 20th century office worker who thought work was all about him.

This gave birth to the pyramid climber who sought the right mentor to flatter, the right boxes to fill to attain an inside track to promotion, leaving nothing to chance, but also little time or energy to do the job paid to do.

Nationally, early in the 20th century, 80 percent of American workers were in farming, manufacturing or allied fields.  These workers did not consider what office workers did as “work.” 

They saw these workers as an effete mob, effeminate, greedy, decadent, talkative, cowardly, and more interested in being well dressed than having a skill set.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of “The Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), and the guru of assembly line time and motion efficiency, turned his attention to office work and workers at mid-century. 

In the 1950s, time and motion studies were conducted of office workers in an attempt to replicate the rhythm of the factory. 

Drucker was right in sync with Taylor's idea, seeing these workers as cogs in a machine by adding his Management by Objectives (MBOs) to the mix.  A bevy of work station architects followed.

These ergonomic specialists came on the scene to make office workers as efficient as automatons, the apotheosis of form following function in skyscrapers to house these workers.

Millions of workers flocked into these buildings to work in “cells” or “cubes” in open three-walled cubicles, in building now known as “Taylor’s Cathedrals.”

To earn access to these cubicles (post-World War II), increasingly, you had to be credentialed, which meant you had to submit to IQ tests and personality profiles, to assessment centers, where the nature of your work was created to assess your capability to do the job, followed by a barrage of interviews conducted by executives before winning approval and being hired.

Much of this was tossed out a decade later, especially the IQ tests and personality profiles, as being unconstitutional.

I’m familiar with this process as I endured it when I was hired by Nalco Chemical Company in 1958. The company prided itself in screening 200 qualified applicants before hiring one.

Less than two decades after the war, an army of mainly academics created paradigms to make management less draconian and arbitrary when it came to these workers.

 

Such managerial theorists as Douglas McGregor, Rensis Likert, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, Frederick Hertzberg, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard appeared with their solutions, but alas, none succeeded. 

The workplace was evolving more quickly than recipes could be formulated to deal with the changing situation.

Sociologists entered the fray with such books The Lonely Crowd, and The Organization Man, and such films as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. 

Anomie and self-estrangement were part of the new vocabulary to describe the loss of social and economic identity of workers who felt little connection to work or themselves.  

                          

Meanwhile, with the workplace now more than 80 percent occupied by office workers in cubicles, the ergonomic gurus turned to personalizing these cubicles as veritable oases. 

Although workers were now caged in these labyrinth catacombs, each office worker could call his place and space his “home away from home."

These diminutive spaces were cross pollinated with the right chair, desk, filing cabinet, and bookcase to be perfect for the occupant.

But then came the dot.com revolution of the 1980s.

Now all bets were once again off.

The bookcases and filing cabinets had to go, as well as pushing paper, and in place was a computer screen that needed constant attention, which meant resolute brainpower to develop and run innovative operational programs. 

The work was exhaustive.  What to do?

To keep minds fresh, on task, office work of the past was scuttled, and the workplace was turned into a playground. 

No more suits and ties, now it was jeans and T-shirts.  Executives dressed the same as workers.  Everything was loosey goosey, but kept on task, always on task.

Pizzas were delivered, beer busts on campus on Friday nights (workplaces came to be called "campuses"), full recreational facilities including basketball and handball courts, running tracks, weight rooms, and entertainment centers to rival Disney World.

The 80/20 rule, which has always held was now more apparent.  As much as 90 percent of work being done could be reduced to 10 percent of these office workers.  Other workers were too busy playing, or thinking about playing, or complaining about not having enough time to play.

Ergonomic gurus promoted the idea of turning these glass cathedrals into open spaces sans defined functionality, which meant no cubicles. 

So, people got lost at work as to where they should be or what they should do because work had been changed into eclectic paradises with no specific work stations. 

Saval goes into this to read like science fiction.  Perhaps it is.

.

A current trend, which may prove anachronistic, is to abandon these monolithic vertical cities for flat one-story barracks like buildings in small towns in countryside and suburban settings, where hundreds of computer screens drone on 24/7 with attentive eyes on the Wide World Web.

The reason these flatbed cities may prove anachronistic is because progressive thinkers are playing with the idea of most office workers working at home, or if not working at home, not working at all.  

As this pregnant idea is bandied about, others are thinking of abandoning the whole concept of working at home to simply outsourcing most of a company's work, thus reducing the overhead costs, and the cost of benefits, pensions, and other entitlements. 

This outsourcing designates these workers euphemistically as "contract consultants," meaning they are on their own nickel.

Little thought has been given to the fact that a short fifty years ago, people worked in one place for one company their entire careers.  They felt secure and loyal to that employer, and counted on entitlements and benefits as part of that security package.

Just as farmers and manufacturers had no idea what office workers called "work" a century ago, these office workers cannot get their minds around the idea of work being that of "contract consultants."  They translate that idea into insecurity and even poverty, subject to the whims of employers. 

It should come as no surprise that trauma is written on these workers' faces as if in scarlet letters.  For the past two or three generations, nothing even close to this has been demanded of them as workers. 

That said the old rules of employment have been turned upside down, and workers have been given no orientation, no training, no insight, and no perspective on what these new demands may entail.  

They have not been asked to develop a self-employed mindset, a mindset that cannot be realized instantaneously by osmosis.

This will take special attention, attention that is beyond the pale of the current conversation.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects by 2020, less than a short six years away, freelancers, temporary workers, day laborers and independent contract consultants will constitute 40 to 50 percent of the workforce.  Can you fathom much less imagine that?

 

Regarding freelancers, the bureau also reports that currently as high as 77 percent of these workers have had trouble collecting payment for the work provided.  Employers appear to be holding the money as long as they legally can.  This should give pause.

*    *     *

NOTE: 

TATE Publishing Company is coming out with Second Editions of Dr. Fisher's books on this topic: Work Without Manager: A View from the Trenches (2014), Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge (2014), The Worker, Alone!  Going Against the Grain (2014). and Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2014). 

 

POEM -- AFRAID OF THE DARK? CAPTURES SOME ATTENTION!

QUESTION:

In your poem,

“Afraid of the Dark?” --

What do you mean?

ANSWER:

The poem relates to my mourning of 

Dystopian reflection

In which I realize madness has become 

The societal norm across the globe.

The operational words implied in the poem are:

Insanity & Extinction!

AFRAID OF THE DARK?

AFRAID OF THE DARK?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 30, 2014

Afraid of the dark

For what it hides

Afraid of the heart’s

Treacherous sides

Afraid of the truth

Lost in the uncouth

Alone in our terror

Afraid of the dark

Truth is something we take for granted, but have no knowledge of.  

Our behavior across the planet tells us we are not acquainted with truth.  

Truth hides in the darkness of our soul, a cold and lonely place with no one with the courage to reach down and draw truth into the warmth of the light.

We are alone and misbegotten, stumbling forward in the hubris of darkness as if a protective shroud.

We are unaware of how dissembling as a species we have become.

We might as well be ants hovering for existence under the cold darkness of rocks for how little our existence suggest consciousness.

We kill and plunder, rape and pillage, cheat and slander, exploit and destroy, obliterate and annihilate, afraid of the dark.

We hide in towers of cold steel, which separate us from each other but not from our darkness.

We salute barriers of cloth as if they are real and hide in the darkness that they provide to justify killing and plundering for we are afraid of the dark.

Truth would tell us that we are not alone.

Truth would tell us that we are not special.

Truth would tell us that we are not complete within and of ourselves.

Truth would tell us that there is a higher power than our consciousness.

Truth would tell us that because we are afraid of the dark we lack the survival instincts of ants.

Truth would tell us that being afraid of the dark personifies the ghost of terror.  

*     *     *

A RETROSPECTIVE ON CHRISTOPHER ERIC HITCHENS

A RETROSPECTIVE ON CHRISTOPHER ERIC HITCHENS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 28, 2014

It is a surprise to me that I am writing this.  I have been a devoted subscriber to The London Review for more than twenty years.  In the November 26, 1998 issue, the lead story was a Christopher Hitchens book review of Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998) by Michael Ignatieff, which I had read, as I have read most works written by or published about Isaiah Berlin.  

To say I am a devotee to the philosopher of ideas is a moot point. 

On the other hand, I was only remotely acquainted with Christopher Hitchens.  I had read other book reviews of his in Foreign Affairs and The New York Review, as well as having seen him on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS television as well as C-Span "Book Notes.". 

I remembered his deep smooth voice, rich vocabulary and that urbane public school aplomb common to Cambridge, England graduates of Oxford that he clearly displayed. 

Given my disgust with the Hitchens book review, where it questioned Isaiah Berlin’s sincerity and integrity, I wrote to an author friend, Charles D. Hayes, who was more familiar with Hitchens, learning from him that this was the Hitchens style.

Time past, and one day at Barnes & Nobles, I picked up a copy of Why Orwell Matters (2002) by Christopher Hitchens in the “bargain books” section in 2006, and read it with some curiosity, as I am a big fan of George Orwell.  

Reading the Hitchen book was an experience.  I had read D. J. Taylor’s definitive biography Orwell: The Life (2003), and was surprised to find that in this slender volume Hitchens managed to develop insights into Orwell missing entirely in the other book.

Then one day, earlier this year, I ordered from Daedalus Books Arguably, Essays by Christopher Hitchens (2011), published the same year as his death.

My intentions were to read a few essays in this nearly 800-page volume, but not the entire book.  I thought of cherry picking the essays, and leave it at that.

But after reading the “Introduction,” I found that I was unable to put the book aside until I had read every single essays, using my highlighter generously in the process..

Never have I read a more engaging essayist, and I have been addicted to essays most of my life going back to those written by Montaigne up to and through Emerson and Thoreau, and on to Hubbard and Hoffer, among others.

How refreshing to have a person express views that he cherishes, views that might offend, but still enlighten, views that cut through rhetoric and posturing to state acerbic truths as perceived by the writer.

Name a hotbed in the world, and Hitchens has been there; name a controversial subject such as God, religion, or personalities in the news, and he has had cutting words to get under the skin.  

He opens this work with an essay, “Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment.”  Our Founding Fathers are real, vulnerable, flawed and engaging in his hands. 

Some consider me quite a reader, but the breadth and depth of my reading is nothing compared to his.  And if you like the sound of a good sentence, read this book, or if you like earthy expletives punctuating a sentence or controversial topic, they are here, too.  

Hitchens has interviewed the leaders of the world, and been to all the hot spots, but he has also lived with and broken bread with the disenfranchised with equal vigor. 

Born in Waterlooville, Hampshire, England on April 13, 1949, graduate of Balliol College, Oxford in 1970, came to the United States in 1981, became a United States citizen on his birthday April 13, 2007, when he was 58-years-old.

Hitchens died December 15, 2011 at the age of 62 from esophagus cancer, largely attributed to his fondness for scotch and cigarettes and partying.

What sets Hitchens apart from his contemporary scribes, however, was his passionate belief in the eighteenth century “Age of Enlightenment” and all that it stood for: individualism in the face of growing repressive corporate world, freedom, and the roots of a viable culture.  

There is a book just published, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (2014) by Frederick Brown, which indicates that the fall into mediocrity has tainted Western culture for some time, largely by default, giving birth to some of the international issues that come and stay, seemingly forever.  .  

It would be interesting to have the “Hitchens take” on this book, which covers France’s growing enchantment with the mystical, the irrational, chance, “automatic writing,” improvisation, the occult, and concomitantly, giving rise to fascism, communism, consciousness, cultural rigidity, while making a rapid departure from classical education to pragmatics.

The book signaled a retreat from science into technology with the rise of media to control consciousness.  Sound familiar?  

Hitchens was against all of this, against the mania that followed “9/11” and  of the “water boarding” of terrorist suspects.  

He agreed as an assignment for Vanity Fair magazine to submit to controlled water boarding to experience the terror of the torture.  He lasted twenty seconds.

Historian Joachim Fest, author of Hitler (1974) and Speer: The Final Verdict (2001) was the quintessential enlightenment stalwart that came to mind reading this.  

Fest and his father were known as German Bildungsburgers, a word that doesn't translate well.  During the 1940s, Joachim was a child, but his father was a teacher, but lost his position and stature because he refused to abandon his Bildungsburgerstrum and become a Nazi, having been schooled in Greek and Latin, classics of European literature, German classical music and German enlightenment philosophy, which was light years away from the hysteria of Nazism.  In a word, the Fests were committed to the culture of reason.  

Joachim Fest isn’t mentioned in Arguably but Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass is, who become a Nazi.

I am dwelling on this a bit, as Hitchens has much to say about the dumbing down of culture, vocational education versus classical education, and collectivism versus progressive individualism.  He sees culture formulated without a frame, and removed from its traditional moorings.

Arguably is as entertaining as it is informative, and a delightful page turner.  For example:

On Gore Vidal: He loves European cosmopolitanism, even living there, and shies away from being an American writer like Norman Mailer, as he is fascinated with English social niceties.

On faith: It requires the surrender of the mind, the surrender of reason, which is the only thing that matters.

On Joyce Carole Oats: The three most regrettable words in literature are Joyce Carole Oats.

Most overrated: The four most overrated things are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.

How Europeans see Americans: Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant.  They’ve taken as their own, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all those qualities.

On Jerry Falwell: I think it is a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.  The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called “Reverend.”

On dissent: The noble title of “dissent” must be earned rather than claimed.  It connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

On learning of his terminal cancer: In whatever kind of “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

On water boarding or a bikini wax: Very much more frightening though less painful than the bikini wax.

On believing in God: It would be like living in North Korea.

On politics: Politics is essentially a matter of character.

On defending author Salman Rushdie when he was targeted for death: It was a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved.  In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation.  In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of expression.

On the rich: I don’t care how rich you are I’m not coming to your party.

When asked for a critique of author-philosopher Ayn Rand: I’m invited to be unpleasant at the expense of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.  Well, they’re novels first, as I keep trying to say: there’s more morality in a novel by George Elliott than in the four Gospels, or the four of them put together.  I care very much about literature as a place where real dilemmas, ethical dilemmas are met and dealt with.  So to have novels as transcendentally awful as ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE FOUNTAINHEAD sort of undermines my project.     

On Dickens: Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming the conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself.

To Charlton Heston, a conservative, in a television debate: Keep your hairpiece on.

On human decency: Human decency is not the result of religion, it precedes it.

On falsehood: False consolation is a false friend.

On the mind: The literal mind cannot understand the ironic one.

And a final word on his approaching death: I personally want to “do” death in the active and not the passive.  And to be there to look death in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.  

I share this with you because I am deeply saddened that Christopher Hitchens didn’t have a chance to tell me that I would be better to turn dirt over in my garden than writes these many books.

*     *     *

THE CAGE OF HUMAN INATTENTION AS A CLOSED CYCLE

THE CAGE OF HUMAN INATTENTION AS A CLOSED CYCLE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 22, 2014

We get ourselves in situations in which we feel there isn’t anything we can do to make it better.  The more we try to do something the more we become blind to the reality of the situation.  

We are trying to do something which, in the nature of the thing, is impossible to extricate ourselves, and therefore we develop a feeling of chronic frustration.

Chronic frustration is like living in a cage, forever running around the cage to get out, only staying forever in the cage.  When feeling so trapped, we are like the gerbil on the wheel in the cage, running faster and faster and going nowhere.

In modern parlance since the 1970s, we have called this being in the "rat race," or the everlasting cycle in pursuit of one end, of one’s own end, going around and around afraid to stop, to take a “time out,” or to abandon the wheel. 

The most acceptable way to escape the wheel and the "rat race" has been euphemistically called "burn out," or burning the candle at both ends until there is no longer any wick.  

The least acceptable way is to abandon one's career purposely, emphatically and dramatically.    

We called such people in the 1970s who did this as “drop outs,” and not necessarily in charitable terms. Yours truly was such a drop out.  

So, how do you get out?  That is the wrong question.  

What has to be understood is that there is a trap only if someone can admit to him or herself that they feel trapped, and being so trapped is no longer acceptable.  It is the acknowledgement that we are the observer as well as the observed when it comes to our person, a total entity within ourselves, a corporate body, if you well, with capability of executing personal and professional change irrespective of what others might think or approve of or not.

I was in my mid-thirties in the upper 1 percent of earners, and resigned my executive position although married and the father of four pre-teenage children with no other income than what I had saved, which was modest.

What did I do?  I took a two-year sabbatical, read books, played tennis, and wrote one, and when I was nearly broke went back to school, full time for six years to earn a Ph.D. in social & industrial psychology, totally abandoning my training in chemistry and engineering and management. 

Subsequently, a career developed in consulting, working as part time adjunct professor, then as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, promoted to executive status with this same hi-tech company, retiring again in my 50s to write books.  

I share this with you because you can see it has a consistency, if however not forced. It found me ending up where I would have liked to have gone from the beginning, but didn't believe I could afford to.  That said my income has been modest compared to those years prior to my first retirement.  

Do I have any regrets? Absolutely none!  I'm where I am supposed to be.   

The key to getting out is first embracing the feelings and limitations of bondage.  When you say to yourself, “I am trapped.  I cannot get out of this,” you are describing the trap precisely and the condition of your freedom. 

When you discover the present flow of thought,or the way it is, and then couple that with the existing flow of experience, you run into your chronic frustration.  

Chronic frustration is the cage you have created.  It is no trap.  You are the process.  By design or default, by the choices you have made, you are precisely where you expected to be.  

This is not happening to you.  This is “you.”  You’re not its victim, but its designer.  It is you.  

So, instead of asking, “How do I get out of this,” the question simply disappears.  You step out of the cage and move on, as I did.

I have written a book about this, which is to be published soon on Amazon’s Kindle titled, "WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?”

*     *     *    

AMERICA'S SPECTATOR PRESIDENT -- PRESIDENT OBAMA PERSONIFIES A CULTURE OF COMPLACENCY

 AMERICA’S SPECTATOR PRESIDENT

OBAMA PERSONIFIES A CULTURE OF COMPLACENCY 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Obama’s second term has been preternaturally unlucky.  The stymied enrolments for his healthcare plan, the multiple errors of computer coordination that forced people to wait days or weeks in front of blank screens, marred the new faith in government the plan had been intended to affirm.  Just when, around the end of April, the trouble seemed to be halfway resolved, with millions finally insured and several deadlines put off, there emerged stories of faked records of treatment and months-long waiting lists at Veterans Hospitals.  It was another failure of managerial competence, in another branch of government to which Obama had professed the warmest commitment.  And there has been nothing resembling a success in foreign policy to offer the embarrassments at home.  The United States, which always needs to be doing something, was in no position to do much about the Russian annexation of Crimea or the conflict in Ukraine.  

David Bromwich, “The World’s Most Important Spectator,” The London Review, July 3, 2014

It would be easy to indict President Barak Obama, given this assessment, but that would be wrong.  Obama did not create the mold, but simply allowed himself to personify it in every real sense.  Face it, America is obsessed with distractions, failing to ask the right questions, or focus on the right problems, that is, the vital few 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference.  Instead, it focuses on the trivial many, or the 80 percent that could be ignored without consequences.

The most damning criticism by author David Bromwich is this:

The United States needs to do something even if it is wrong.  

It is a mentality that General Motors has recently displayed, as well as the IRS in targeting Tea Party conservatives, and the fake records of the Veterans Administration.  Alas, it is endemic to the land, and the President of the United States behaves consistent with that boilerplate.

Bromwich goes on:

A common feature in all these events was that Obama himself seemed far from the scene.  He was looking on, we were made to think, with concern and understanding.

In this Information Age, conspicuous spin on events is the protocol for the government, academic institutions, industrial and commercial enterprises, indeed, for religious affiliations.

All these corporate society operations have their public relations departments, schooling their leaders in how to appear before the television cameras or on Facebook, et al.

We have become a contrived society with the emphasis on presentation and appearance and not on performance.

The President of the United States did not create this boilerplate.  He has simply given it novelistic distinction.

The purpose of a society is not what it says it represents or will do, or threaten to do, but what it does.

We have been reduced to the cover on our cereal boxes that establishes our brand not realizing brand is an advertising gimmick and has nothing to do with when the rubber hits the road. 

Bromwich continues:

Obama is adept at conveying benevolent feelings that his listeners want to share, feelings that could lead to benevolent actions.  He has seemed in his element in the several grief counseling speeches given in the wake of mass killings, not only in Newtown but in Aurora, at Fort Hood, in Tucson, in Boston after the marathon bombings, and in his meetings with bereft homeowners and local officials who were granted disaster funds in the aftermath of recent hurricanes.

Again, the president didn’t invent this tact.  President George W. Bush used it in New Orleans after devastating Hurricane Katrina, claiming  that Director Michael Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had everything under control when it had nothing under control.  Thousands of people were stranded with no logistical support from government, not for days, but for weeks.

President Barak Obama has not been able to escape this malady of leaderless leadership that has become a debilitating disease in American corporate society.

Corporate society is run by narcissistic managers with infallible authority, operating with impunity with business as usual practices, failing to learn anything from cataclysmic disasters, such as the 2008 economic meltdown, which was caused by blatant and egregious excesses on Wall Street.

With the Dow Jones Industrials now in the neighborhood of 17,000, it is apparent that nothing has been learned.  The boom is only a matter of time before another bust.

Bromwich agrees:

Disengagement has become the polite word for Obama’s grip on his own policies.  Absent and not accounted for was the general view of him as the crisis in Ukraine built up in January and February.

Americans are obsessed with the wonders of electronic technology, and those in positions of power are quick to point out all the capabilities of this technology in terms of surveillance, assessment, and the evaluative value it provides.  Yet, there isn’t a condition or a contingency that doesn’t surprise those in charge despite this arrogance, over and over and over again. 

Those in positions of leadership, the president included, create first and second echelons of people who are fanatically loyal to the man in charge, placing on the sideline if not making redundant those who have no ax to grind other than to state facts as they appear, and strategies of possible use in their discharge.

Wall Street had its alarmists in the late 1990s, people who pay attention to chronic problems and were able to see the 2008 meltdown in the headlights, but to no avail, as no one was paying them any mind.

It has become more important to be liked than effective, more important to make others comfortable than to reveal their incompetence, more important to write books and articles that can be read and discarded as the blowhard sentiments of pessimists and discredited on that basis. 

The United States of America has been declining since 1968, and has never recovered from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy.  Instead, it has become preoccupied with its toys of distraction while the world continues on without it.

The United States still persists in saber rattling, and drawing meaningless red lines in the sand, red lines that no one takes seriously, collapsing into complacency while still maintaining the rhetoric of relevance.

David Bromwich is writing about President Barak Obama as “The World’s Most Important Spectator,” but the American people are right behind the president in their collective passivity waiting for something to happen, while sitting complacently in some NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB emporium or listening to talk radio. 

Bromwich concludes his theme with these words:

The Republican Party and some Democrats are saying the US should do more, though they don’t know exactly what.  To judge by the chaos in the region and the confusion of the American political class, whose most ambitious members continue to outbid one another in delusion and posturing, there will have to be further echoes of the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan before the US is forced to think again.

This author writes books in the vernacular of work, workers and the workplace crying for a wakeup call, only to sense no one is listening, and that saddens him deeply.

   

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